Quotes from Kate Atkinson

That was the moment at which he realized that he had possibly become unhinged. What did it matter? The whole world was unhinged.

There was just a beautiful, unearthly silence. He thought of the wood and the bluebells, the owl and the fox, a Hornby train trundling around his bedroom floor, the smell of a cake baking in the oven. The skylark ascending on his thread of song. F-Fox

the grain had entered the shell (Sylvie's own metaphoric stance) and the pearl that would be Edward Beresford Todd began to grow until he was revealed into the sunshine that came before the Great War and lay happily for hours on end in his pram with nothing but a silver hare dangling from the pram hood for company. His

Forget typing," Pamela wrote from Leeds, "you should read philosophy at university, you have the right kind of mind for it. Like a terrier with a terrifically tedious bone.")

They're getting your room ready for you.' He was exhausted. He'd taken them shopping in Primark, not that

Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. "Gone," she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. "Just like that. All that exercise for nothing." Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion.

She placed a protective hand on her bag. It contained two envelopes stuffed with twenties -- five thousand pounds in all -- that she'd just removed from her account at Yorkshire Bank. She would like to see someone trying to snatch it from her -- she was looking forward to beating them to a pulp with her bare hands. No point in having weight, Tracy reasoned, if you weren't prepared to throw it around.

Astonishing things happen all the time," Jackson said. "We just don't notice.

man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams." RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Nature

They were turning into Wallace and Gromit, he could feel it. Soon he'd be calling the dog lad and sharing cheese and crackers with it. There were worse things, he supposed.

pointing. She was completely hopeless.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.

She was the deer. She was the arrow, She was the queen. She was the contradiction, She was the synthesis. Juliet ran.

He was Irish, which always helped. A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't.

When he stepped off the train in Waverley Station yesterday, he had been expecting the 50 percent of his genes that were Scottish to recognize their heritage. He thought perhaps he would discover an emotional link with a past he'd never known, walk down a street and the faces would feel familiar, turn a corner or climb a stair and there would be an epiphany of sorts, but in fact Edinburgh felt more foreign to him than Paris did.

Dirt never slept, so neither would Frobisher until he had swept it away. He was a man inclined to a metaphor.

Ah, but the rich are different,' the footman said, 'they take a lot more looking after.

Alle Menschen werden Brüder.

Harold?' 'Poor man, I suppose

It was the enormity of war, she thought, it left you scrabbling for ways to think about it. Bridget

Viola hadn't seen Sunny for nearly ten years and in the interim he had turned into a complete human being. ("Perhaps the two things aren't unrelated," Bertie said.)

Morris says that you should have nothing in your house that you don't know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful," she

We must remember these people when we are safely in the future.

She allowed the hum and buzz of the park to lullaby her. Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being. Dr Kellet would have approved this thought. And everything was ephemeral, yet everything was eternal, she thought sleepily.